The Red Shoes

As noted in Asia Shock, J-horror and K-horror are film genres wherein just about anything can be haunted; video cassettes, cell phones, computers, you name it. In this Korean film from 2005, guess what? It's a pair of shoes. But make no mistake, this ain't your grampa's The Red Shoes, the boring 1948 Powell/Pressburger flick about a ballerina (although the film does involve ballet -- a thematic nod). In fact, the shoes aren't even red, they're pink. They're plenty wicked, though. Rip your feet right off, they will, as well as possess you with the spirits of killers and eventually drive you insane. Pump it up!

As usual, there's a decades-old backstory that's gradually revealed over 100 minutes or so, in this case dating back to the bad old days of Japanese occupation. The main character is a single mom who may or may not have done away with her asshole husband. She lives alone with her tiny daughter in a dingy apartment across the street from a haunted subway station (where she finds the shoes and thus embarks on her harrowing journey). It's a fairly outlandish premise that nevertheless works. I had my doubts at first; things were moving pretty slowly and once or twice I considered bailing. However something about the film held me, and I found myself gradually sucked in (although the pacing is a little uneven throughout).

I would really only recommend this film to folks who are really into Asian horror. It might be a bit too bleak and/or slow for your average film goer. Still, worth a look I think.

My Boss, My Hero

This Korean high school/gangster genre mash-up had me laughing out loud, and that's saying summat. No wonder, then, that it was the most successful comedy of 2001, although if you're not Korean, or haven't seen a truckload of Korean films, you might be a little freaked out by all the violence -- I'd estimate around a thousand slaps, kicks, punches and whacks with a baseball bat in the tidy 98 minute run time. What's likely to throw the average Western viewer is which slaps are supposed to be funny, and which ones are just plain wrong. The key here is in determining who deserves to be slapped. It is a generally understood concept in Korean culture that there are some people who just need to be slapped. Repeatedly. However, there are those who don't, and in doing so you do them, and the society at large, a disservice, and deserve to be slapped. See how this can all spiral out of control? In My Boss, My Hero, that's exactly what happens.

So you've got mid-level mob boss Do-shik (Jeong Joon-ho), a youthful-looking guy, well-respected, but he never finished high school and his status-conscious boss wants him to go back and graduate -- a straight-up fish-out-of-water comedic premise. But during the course of the story, myriad themes and social issues are explored, extending to the proper application of corporal punishment, corruption in the educational system, school bullying, sexual harassment, teenage prostitution, homosexual persecution and bad karaoke. Oh, and did I mention all the slapping?

Bear in mind that teachers slapping their students around has long been the norm in Korean schools (maybe it's changed, but as of 2001 it was still S.O.P., even in the Gangnam high school where the story is set). As I've mentioned before, Korea has had a rough go of it over the last hundred years -- a brutal colonization by Japan, then the civil war and subsequently a series of dictatorships, both north and south. Institutional violence has been inculcated into the culture (and they were a tough lot even before the 20th century). It's important to keep all this in mind when watching a film like My Boss, My Hero; underneath it all, they're just people like us, with the same loves, lusts, allegiances, and sense of right and wrong. Maybe a little more slap-happy …

Much of the laughs come from the casting of very funny, and funny-looking, actors. Several guys in this flick, you start laughing just looking at them. It's refreshing! Get a goofy-looking guy to play a goofy guy -- go figure, it works. Then make the goofy guy do the human tripod thing (a traditional Korean discipline/torture in which one is forced to balance on two feet and forehead, hands behind back -- also employed in the films Friend and Attack the Gas Station).

I gotta get more into Asian comedies. I wasn't disappointed by Wakeful Nights and you won't be with My Boss, My Hero.

Retribution

Another Kiyoshi Kurosawa picture, another devastating Koji Yakusho performance. Don't know what I'm talking about? That's OK, it really doesn't matter; such is the immediate, visceral nature of film, all you need do is lend 100 minutes to the screen and you'll get it. I'm forever throwing out names and dates and production trivia, but in the end, it's all about the images, the conjured floating world playing out in our eyes. Such is the paradox of film criticism: The better the film, the less you need say about it.

Hey, where are you going? I was only kidding! What you should know is this: Retribution (2006) is a moody, haunting supernatural thriller very much in the mode of Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001). I was a big Kiyoshi Kurosawa booster at one point, but stuff like Charisma (1999), Seance (2000), Bright Future and Doppelganger (both 2003) left me so cold and bored that I sorta drifted away. That said, I found Retribution to be a refreshing return to form.

What's it about? Oh drowning, mostly. There's a serial killer on the loose in Tokyo who likes to drown people in sea water (go figure). The detective on the case (Koji Yakusho) seems to have a personal connection to the case -- this backstory comes gradually, inexorably to the fore, along with a ghost. That's all I'm willing to say at this time …

Retribution is kind of an amalgam of Kurosawa's two finest films, Cure and Pulse. From Cure it takes the serial killer/police procedural thing; from Pulse, the sense of creeping, inevitable spiritual doom. It stands not quite so tall as its forebears, but is a worthy entry and worth a look.

Sleepy Eyes of Death Vol. 3

Hooray! Animeigo has released the third and final batch of Sleepy Eyes of Death films (see my reviews of the first and second). The box contains the final four of 12 excellent samurai films starring the incandescent Raizo Ichikawa. You get #9 A Trail of Traps, #10 Hell is a Woman, #11 In the Spider's Lair, and #12 Castle Menagerie. I review #9 and #12 in Warring Clans, Flashing Blades. I thought they were going to include those reviews in the box, but I guess they forgot. (They did use a quote from this here blog for a box blurb.)

The later SEOD films were particularly dark, with devil worshipers and psychotic elites around every corner. Through it all, our Nemuri Kyoshiro (Ichikawa) cuts a shining path with his sharp wit and patented Full Moon Cut. I threw on Trail of Traps as soon as I got the box and found it every bit as enjoyable as the first time I saw it, maybe more. 

This one's a no-brainer, folks: Ya gotta get it. Specialty outfits like Animeigo are on their last legs these days -- you won't just be getting a bunch of lively, bizarre and thoroughly entertaining samurai films, you'll be helping to sustain an important cultural resource. I don't know about you, but I've been stockpiling disks for years -- I don't want to be at the mercy of the cloud, and someone else's idea of what I want to watch. Maybe they'll offer these films, maybe they won't. All I know is I got mine and you should get yours ... before it's too late.

K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces

I'm not a big fan of superhero movies. Avengers, X-Men, Batman -- to hell with 'em. Can't use 'em. Vapid pap, as thin and two-dimensional as the paper they were originally printed on. But leave it to the Japanese to make something work better. I'm talking about a movie called K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces (aka K-20: Legend of the Mask -- the K is for "kaijin," fiend.). This engaging thrill ride from 2008 is jam-packed with acrobatics, parkour, wire-fu, period costumes and special effects plus real character development and one hell of a twist ending. Good shit, Maynard!

Anybody who knows what ero-guro means will be familiar with the king of this particular literary genre, one Edogawa Rampo (I've written about him many times). And if you know anything about Edogawa Rampo, you'll know that he wrote scads of mystery novels featuring his detective, Kogoro Akechi. Now Akechi's arch rival was this guy, the Fiend with Twenty Faces (see where we're going with this?) but there's a twist: This film is a re-imagining of these two characters, one in which Akechi isn't quite the heroic figure of Rampo's novels. K-20 is based on 1989 novel The Story of Nijumenso (literally "twenty faces") by So Kitamura. The author took some liberties with the beloved characters, giving us a nicer Nijumenso and a less honorable Akechi. How much you take offense to such tampering will no doubt affect how much you enjoy this picture.

The film is set in an alternate 1949, one in which Japan has avoided WW II and Nikola Tesla technology is being actively pursued. However, a rigid two-class system is enforced by the government and there's an awful lot of very poor people. Akechi is engaged to a duchess (Takako Matsu) and is after a circus performer (Takeshi Kaneshiro) whom he thinks is Nijumenso. Along the way we meet thieves and orphans, cops and soldiers, oh yeah, and that guy with all the faces.

So I'm just here to say I had a blast, really enjoyed the flick. Nice to have some fun for a change! (Thanks to Dr. Stan Glick for the disk.)

Sars Wars

I'm not a big zombie guy. Of all the monster genres, I've always found this one, for all its chaos and gore, to be the most jejune. Plus it's been done to death; zombie is the new vampire, with shows like The Walking Dead flogging it to its last drop of congealed blood. The only way to make zombies palatable to me is to present them in a humorous context; Return of the Living Dead, Dead Alive, Shaun of the Dead, that sort of thing. And to this end I give you Sars Wars (2004). Here is a Thai zombie comedy so deliriously goofy and ridiculously gruesome, it gave me a new appreciation for zombie movies.

First off, the title: As some of you may remember, about a decade ago, there was an outbreak of a virus called SARS in East Asia. (I went to Japan in 2003 and I recall it was a big deal; lots of warning signs at the airport.) Anyhow, filmmaker Taweewat Wantha got the idea to make a film about a mutated version of SARS that … wait for it … turns people into zombies! Then he manga-ized things, adding ninja-like superheroes and animated sequences to heighten the crazy action factor. Not to be stopped, he went on to sex things up with a slinky, fishnet-clad lady scientist and a hot, kick-ass high school girl. The latter character is kidnapped by a band of inept thugs holed up in an apartment building that just happens to be ground zero for the new super SARS outbreak. Soon enough everything erupts into a goretastic zombie-palooza.

In a nutshell: You've gotta see this movie. The playfulness and overall sense of fun I've found in Thai culture makes for an immensely enjoyable film. I burst out laughing a number of times, and any film that can do that is an instant classic in my book. (Speaking of "my book," I regret not getting this flick into Asia Shock -- oh well). The characters have a tendency to make jokes about the movie on the fly like, "This is the most ridiculous moment yet" "I know, but you've watched it this far!" There are also nice twists, like a zombie cockroach, a zombie baby and a snake that eats a zombie cat and becomes a giant zombie cat-snake. And let's not forget the ugliest transsexual in the world … and his/her sex scene!

Upping the ante on the horror front is a touch of the ferocious, folkloric Thai ghost. If you know anything about traditional ghosts in Thailand, you'll be familiar with a strain that doesn't just haunt you -- they'll eat your fucking liver! At least one female zombie in this film is of this sort -- a fanged, feral thing far more local than anything out of Hollywood.

So if it's a mind-bending melange of the goofy, gory, sexy and sentimental you're after, you can't ask for more than Sars Wars (aka Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis). That is all.

Dream Home

As you can imagine, Hong Kong high-rise apartments tend to be rather spendy. We're talking millions of HK dollars for a few hundred square feet. A luxury flat is to die for, and in the case of Dream Home, that's literally the case.

Man oh man, I have not seen a film with this level of graphic violence in quite awhile. Folks are shot, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned, impaled, dismembered, disemboweled, suffocated (one chick is even dispatched via toilet bowl), all with a stylistic verve and pace that makes you squirm with a kind of sick fascination (or is it just me?). Here is ultraviolence done right; timing, camera angle, special effects -- everything comes together in a kind of gruesome harmony. A blood-spattered tour de force!

The story is somewhat less well-executed. It's told in flashbacks, intercut with the real-time killing spree of one woman, pretty Sheung Cheng-lai (Josie Ho). The flashbacks jump back and forth to scenes throughout Cheng's life, from her childhood living in a rundown apartment building (from which she and her family are eventually driven out to make way for high-rise construction) to the present. As a child, little Cheng had a grandpa who always wanted a place by the harbor, and the girl vows to make that happen some day. This promise becomes an obsession throughout her life and, when thwarted, turns her into a homicidal maelstrom of creative, tool belt-oriented violence in the very apartment she'd tried so hard to acquire. 

Here's the rub: The indignities Cheng has suffered don't quite compensate, story-wise, for her rampage. Look, I get it; Cheng represents the oppressed working class, taking sweet revenge on those privileged bastards in the towers: the golf club-toting business man, the drug-addled libertines, the spoiled housewives. Perhaps if Cheng had been shown being personally victimized and violated by such types, the story would have worked better; traditionally, in films of this sort, she would have had far more heinous things done to her to bring about such a transformation. As it is, we spend so much time with her in the flashbacks, seeing her as a nice, normal person, that the sudden shift into special ops-style killing machine -- well, it's a bit of a *clank*.

Don't get me wrong, this doesn't ruin the film or anything -- just a weakness which may or may not be my own personal niggle. Other than that, it's a great picture that offers much more than just a lot of blood and entrails and a guy getting killed with a bong (you'll see). There is a dark humor that runs through the piece, as well as social commentary and topical relevance (the film came out in 2010 and is very aware of it's moment in light of the then-recent global economic downturn).

Star Josie Ho was also a producer on the film, her first outing as such. She was reportedly interested in doing a horror picture (as it is the perennial cash cow of film genres). She took one look at the legendary The Story of Rikki (see my review in Asia Shock) and decided that was the direction she wanted to go in. The influence is not undetectable …

Dream Home is one of those films that's been sitting in my to-watch pile for some time -- the kind you finally screen and slap yourself for not watching sooner. And don't think I've spoiled it for you; there's lot's of stuff I've (deliberately) not mentioned, and a lovely twist ending I'm sure you'll enjoy. So put on your best blood-resistant raincoat, get some popcorn, and get ready to get your gore on!